Hosting

Bluehost v/s Siteground | Comparison and Review

If you have to select a hosting service provider between Bluehost and Siteground, you could end up in a dilemma. Both these platforms are very attractive choices for people who want to host a personal blog or a small business website. The platforms offer some awesome plans for high-end commercial websites as well. However, if you are a beginner in this field, then these two platforms must certainly be on your radar.

Note: “Techlogitic Team is not responsible for any plan changes.”

Let’s compare how Siteground and Bluehost fare against each other in a direct comparison of their features and offerings.

Speed and reliability

When it comes to providing the best business, hardware backed solutions for hosting, Siteground is arguably the best. The platform has some of the best innovation on the market including free CDN by Cloudflare and their own SuperCacher. This is not all; they boast of their NGINX web server technology, which, when coupled with their supreme quality SSD drives, provides you speedy, reliable and high-end websites.

Bluehost, on the other hand, has reliable but somewhat outdated technology because of which they consistently perform lesser than their rivals. In the past 2-3 years, the platform has hardly innovated or added any superior tech for its users, especially those who are using their basic plans. Their dedicated servers and VPS are great quality, but shared servers do present some issues.

There have been complaints about the company cramming up servers to save costs, which has caused lags on the websites hosted in their spaces. Sometimes, the webpage could take as long as 3.65 seconds to load which hampers their reputation. So Bluehost is at a major disadvantage here.

Up-time Comparison

Up-time is similar for both the companies. However, Siteground takes the biggest piece of the pie here as well. Both the platforms offer 99.99% up-time guarantee. However, we noted in our tests that while Siteground provides 99.99% up-time with only one outage, Bluehost provides 99.96% up-time with 3 outages. The downtime at Bluehost is often a problem for everyone. On an average, the consistent downtime has brought down the Bluehost monthly up-time to only 98%.

This makes Siteground a more reliable hosting provider as compared to Bluehost.

Comparison among Server Response Time

The results are similar to website speed and uptime. Siteground is 2x faster than Bluehost. Note that slower server response times means that the company is using lower quality or outdated server technology for their users. Through multiple tests on several websites, we found that the Siteground again leaves its rival behind in this sector.

Pricing Comparison

Siteground isn’t exactly cheap. However, it does provide a good value-based platform for its users. With a new or transfer domain, you could get a 30-day money back guarantee and 10 to 30 GB of disk space. You get a free website builder and unlimited bandwidth here. The support they provide is also commendable. You can transfer your website for free and get unlimited site traffic, Cloudflare CDN, as well as 1-click WordPress, installs on your website.

Bluehost is the undisputed king of cheap web hosting. Its plans are designed for everyone- a hobby blogger to a small business. Even though the plans may become costlier over time, especially after the first year is over, you can enjoy some really good perks for the first 12 months at least. It is the cheapest hosting provider, and so far, no other platform has been able to challenge its authority. For the price they offer, their hardware configurations are good. Emails, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, etc. are some features that everyone loves with this provider. Their WordPress hosting is also good. You get a free Weebly website builder and free Cloudflare CDN as well.

Dedicated hosting comparison

If your business has significantly outgrown shared hosting and VPS, it is high time you shift to the dedicated hosting options of your preferred platform. Siteground provides path breaking dedicated hosting with data centers located all over the world. They help in scaling a website well, enhance security and provide better accessibility while improving speed as well.

The platform runs on extremely powerful Xeon E3 or E5 processors, and at least four cores are used in eight threads in the CPU. You have three plans to choose from- Entry server, Power server and Enterprise server. You can get HDD disk spaces ranging from 500 GB SATA II to 500 GB SATA IIIs and even the RAID 10. The hardware used by this platform is always the top in the business, providing 99.996% uptime, even on the most demanding websites.

On the software side, custom patches and bug fixes are common which helps in improving site speed as well as security. They have a unique server isolation mechanism because of which a vulnerable account isn’t able to infiltrate into the website easily. While other servers may take up to 40 minutes to detect issues in the system, their servers do the same instantaneously. You get the best customer support services on the market here, which makes the dedicated server even more valuable.

one can expect cPanel, WHM, SSH access and 24/7 uptime monitoring coupled with iptables firewall, Cloudflare CDN, private DNS server setup and 5 free IPs in plans.

With Bluehost, the perks are many, but the hardware and software innovation could be lacking. However, it still provides you a very flexible and reliable option to its users. They have one of the best shared hosting options in the industry. Their platform is designed in-house, which helps in keeping the users completely safe as patches and bug fixes are easier to make for the platform. You get RAID 1 mirrored storage with at least 3 IP addresses for each plan. You also get 24/7 support from their able team.

VPS hosting

Siteground has one of the best VPS hosting options available to the users. They don’t host a typical virtual private network. Instead, they have a dedicated cloud solution for their users. This system has been designed exclusively for their customers from scratch and answers all the needs of webmasters- whether new or experienced. Though it is similar to a typical VPS network, it is far more scalable than an average server, which makes all the difference here. You could build your website on this website, upgrade and scale it within minutes.

They have a downtime prevention mechanism, SuperCacher abilities and perform daily backups for all websites as well. There are four caching options available to the users because of which you always get great page load timing. This fully managed cloud hosting solution brings high-end scalability and ultra-fast performance as well.

The websites are hosted in three powerful datacenters around the world. You get Git integration and 1-click installation for all popular content management systems and their related applications. Apart from this, there are iptables firewalls and dedicated IP addresses for your server.

Bluehost also has a powerful VPS hosting option. You will be getting two core and four core choices in the serves, that comes with 4 GB or 16 GB RAM options. The security options are also great here. The redundant storage options that come with excellent SiteLock security could be very useful for the users. Their VPS hosting is endorsed by WordPress due to the excellent support it provides for its CMS. You will also experience seamless migration from the shared hosting plans of the platform.

Which one is more Adaptable?

Siteground is more beginner friendly as compared to Bluehost. It has a simpler sign up process, and all other operations on the platform are quite easy to handle as well. In fact, you could even create a beautiful cloud managed VPS hosted a website for yourself within hours which could be upgraded or scaled with just a few clicks.

For newbies or relatively new users, customer friendliness of a platform is very important. Siteground scores highly here as well. They have an excellent knowledge base which customer can use to find solutions to their problems. If they need further support, they can always contact the support staff 24/7 and get their queries answered. The satisfaction level of their services is also much higher than their competitors, thanks to their able and wise customer support team.

With Bluehost, it is an entirely different tale. Though they have a good customer support system, they remain jam-packed with queries, delaying answers to your problems even further. Many people complain that Bluehost has one of the worst customer service staff in the market. This is easily reflected by the fact that you could take as much as 4 mins to contact a staff member for resolution of your queries during peak times. For several other hosting providers, including Siteground, the waiting period is merely a few seconds.

Conclusion

Overall, we can safely suggest that while Bluehost is a good and cheap option, Siteground provides much better services at a reasonable cost. They are dependable, and their technology is also modern and scalable. While you may feel the pinch in paying a small premium for good services, you could eventually realize that Bluehost’s cheap services could end up being very expensive for you. Our suggestion is to stop worrying about a few cents and choose a reliable hosting partner for your website.

Still have questions? Comment down below and we will be reverting as soon as possible.

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